Sonus Maximizing Border Control
Westford-based IP global security company Sonus Networks Inc. recently announced fourth-quarter and year-end results, and heads into 2012 with new customers and new growth.
With a 4-percent total revenue increase between 2010 and 2011 to $259.7 million, and revenue for its flagship product - session border controllers - rising to $17.5 million for the fourth quarter 2011 compared to $10.4 million in the third quarter of 2011 and $8.7 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010 - Sonus is boasting a dozen new customers in the last quarter, reduced operating costs and significant market growth.
The company registered a 19-percent increase in its net loss, but that had to do with one large transaction last year, said senior vice president and chief financial officer Maurice "Moe" Castonguay. The deal contained a "significant amount of third-party product that we resold at low margins," he said. Higher tax expense on foreign operations also contributed to the loss, he said.
What's ahead for the company is a refined focus on its session border control market, which serves any industry in which quick decisions are needed via voice, video and text.
New Communication
Sonus' goal is supporting and securing the new ways people communicate.
The company has more than 1,000 global employees, with about a third at its Westford facility.
With texting, instant messaging, cell phones, Twitter and Facebook, people are looking to make connections as secure as possible. These innovations bring with them new conditions for enterprise and service providers, said Castonguay, which is where Sonus comes in. "Sonus is uniquely capable to bring scale, reliability and intelligence to these communications," he said.
Sonus, Castonguay said, is known for TDM - time-division multiplexing - a process in which different data streams are put on the same signal and are received based on their timing.
Now, the company's current focus - session border controllers, which provide media transcoding, security and encryption for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) networks - offers improved and protected communication to pretty much everyone. Of the 12 new enterprise or service-provider customers acquired in the fourth quarter, 11 bought session border controller products, he said. "These new customers were across multiple industries, geographies and markets," he said. Basically, any business in which decisions need to be made quickly can benefit from session border controllers, said Castonguay.
Sonus is positioning itself to meet demand for communications streamlined over the Internet and the ability to access new applications via cloud computing. The company is working to meet trends of more employees working outside the office and more company applications - such as accounting - migrating to the cloud.
In addition to R&D investments, Sonus is working to streamline its go-to-market capability, said Castonguay. Hiring at the Sonus facility in Westford grew 18 percent year over year, spokesperson said Kerry Brackett in an email. Those hires have come in sales, engineering and human resources, among other divisions. Castonguay said the team has been expanded and a select set of channel partners set up.
A challenge, said Castonguay, is making potential customers see that they're not boxed in by older investments, such as legacy TDM or PBX (private branch exchange telephone) technology. "There is a different approach they can take - one which leverages (their) prior network," he said.
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